Share of attention: the most important KPI you are currently not measuring.
As one can expect in an early stage start-up, the past 7 month have been absolutely hectic. Between growing the team, finalizing the alpha version of the product and onboarding our first set of (amazing!) design partners, it constantly felt like scrambling and hustling. This week I finally got around to strategically think about how much of my attention to allocate to each of the many responsibilities I hold. In working on start ups there is always the temptation to try and do everything but in the words of the great Micheal Porter, choosing what not to do is really what allows me to shape the company. The opportunity cost is real, and I need to be ruthless and strategic in the way I divide my attention. Given the stage we are in, I figured that the optimal allocation for the time being would be as follows:
I would devote 50% of my attention to building our marketing machine, assets and brand to prepare for our beta launch, 20% of my attention to product strategy and positioning, 20% to adding value to our amazing design partners and getting their invaluable feedback on the product, and 10% to bringing in new design partners in segments we want to get smarter on.
This exercise made me think — I am really good at setting clear goals but how can I tell if I actually spend my attention the way I intended?
At HBS we were taught that great managers manage not only for outcomes, but also for process. Everyone can set ambitious KPIs but empowering ourselves and others to deliver on them is way trickier. It entails breaking things down to their sub components and understanding how they interact with each other, making sure that we and others around us focus on the right things, the things we are good at, the things we can add the most value doing.
In the physical production world, we can track a standardized product as it moves down a standardized assembly line and design the whole process to produce the most amount of products in a given unit of time.
But in the knowledge and digital economy the process of creating great products is far from linear and standardized. Every single day looks different than the day before. Competing priorities force us to switch from one topic to another, we collaborate with certain people one day and with a totally different set the next day.
It’s pretty messy, and in the constant day to day pressures that pull us in every direction it’s often the case we find ourselves investing too much time in ad-hoc topics and not enough in topics we strategically chose to focus on. Our attention is the main input of production, and it is often slipping away from us.
So how can we better understand where does our attention go and how it measures against our ideal state?
We started Akooda because we believe that the written communication we produce every day — on Slack, in meetings, in documents, in Salesforce and Github, all around — can teach us something about what we are actually working on, where our knowledge can be useful, and where our attention goes. If we aggregate and synthesize it in a meaningful way, we can diagnose and optimize our attention allocation and processes. How powerful is that?
